As more organizations adopt cloud computing for developing and deploying applications on outsourced infrastructure, a new set of capabilities and challenges have emerged. While cloud computing promises seemingly elastic capacity and scaling, certain present architectural limitations in cloud platforms limit the seamless transition of applications to clouds (e.g., state management and fault tolerance (FT) in the stacks of different PaaS clouds).
As conventionally known, application resilience is the ability of an application to react to problems in one of its components and still provide the best possible service. Resiliency has become more important as organizations continue to rapidly implement software across multi-tier, multiple technology infrastructures. As well known, complex, multiple technology environments have a higher degree of failure and security issues.
The application resilience is a term used very broadly that includes FT, high availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR), and other planned and unplanned outages. Major characteristics of the multiple data center deployment are capacity, latency, performance, resiliency, DR, hot-swap capability, re-routing requests, data synchronization, federated identity and regulatory compliance, in which resilience is a primary component that application and data availability for the customer is the primary focus.
In spite of numerous techniques employed by the vendors to make application resilience on the platform there is no standard framework that describes what application resilience in cloud means. As well known, the cloud community is fragmented on their own designs of cloud and so no standards for application developers and testers to follow how a cloud application should behave in case of outage. This is true with customers also that they are not aware what application resilience is involved with. There are other approaches literatures disclosing framework in some research papers published on cloud services and other platforms, but the papers do not address the broad concerns of the application resilience in PaaS cloud including all the parties involved.
In order to summarize the technical issues involved in the field of application resilience for applications, one of the technical problems majorly faced for application resilience for applications is that, as application resilience is mandatory for all the cloud applications, deployment and the mechanisms implemented by vendors varied a lot in nature for each and every cloud. There is no standard framework describing what application resilience in cloud means and how it can be implemented. Also, the cloud outages happens, rarely though, but cloud community is fragmented on their own designs of outage handling. Hence, there are no standards for application developers and testers to follow how a cloud application should behave in case of outage. This outage scenario is very troublesome that anyone could be claiming application resilience but not really following any standards.
Hence, there is a dire need to develop a standard framework that will help all the parties involved to adhere to it and follow the constraints to make applications resilience in cloud. Thus it will be very beneficial to have a cloud framework which deals with application resilience.